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I am on record as worrying about Peter Jackson’s choice to merely produce, but not actually direct, The Hobbit. However, I think that as far as non-Jackson choices go, the just-announced Guillermo del Toro is about as good as it gets. Nevertheless, this worries me:

[H]asn’t anybody noticed that del Toro has repeatedly said he doesn’t like Tolkien, and that he never finished reading “The Lord of the Rings”? Here’s what he told me in Cannes in 2006, when I asked him about the influence of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis on his own work: “I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.”

Let’s see, he doesn’t like “little guys and dragons” or hairy-footed hobbits, and “The Hobbit” would be a movie about what, exactly? Seriously, I think del Toro was speaking from the heart, and I think he’s right. His aesthetic is darker, more Gothic and more grotesque than the Tolkien-via-Jackson universe; it derives more from the medieval mire of middle-European fairy tale than from the high-toned, pre-modern northern European epics Tolkien was channeling.

What I really want is to see del Toro direct a remake of Clash of the Titans.

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Well, maybe that is worrisome, but perhaps he’ll make The Hobbit a bit more “terrible” (as in terror-inducing) than Jacksons LOTR, which (in my minority view, likely) wasn’t focused enough on the grandeur and hateur of its high and mighty characters (Gandalf, Aragorn, etc.)

Surely if you’re going to have this damn movie made, you’d rather have it made by a sort of smart dude, right? And being a bit turned off by Tolkein would appear to be a good sign that in fact del Toro is a sort of smart dude. Paradox? Deal with it.

I don’t know if there is anything to worry about. I think Rick Berman was pretty much on record as not really being into Sci-Fi, and he managed to keep the <i>Star Trek</i> franchise on the air longer than the great bird of the galaxy, Gene Roddenberry.